"There is definitely a connection between funding per student and student education and student achievement," said Shawn Judson, superintendent of the Etiwanda School District.

In the biggest change to how California's public schools are funded since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, Gov. Jerry Brown pushed through the Local Control Funding Formula in this year's budget, which wipes away many existing targeted funds that could only be spent on specific programs.

The new formula provides additional funds to districts based on how many foster, poor and non-English-speaking students they have, but gives districts the flexibility to figure out how to best spend those funds instead of dictating their use from Sacramento.

"They know where they want to spend their dollars better than the state does," said Dan Evans, spokesman for the San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools Office. "(School districts) now have better and more flexibility in terms of targeting the dollars where they'll do the most good. "? It's going to be different from Redlands to Fontana to Yucaipa to Victorville."

No district will get less per pupil than it received last year, and in some cases, will get hundreds of dollars more. Rialto Unified received $6,163 per student in 2011-2012 under the previous funding formula and in 2013-2014, it is expected to receive $6,564.

That extra money can be used for things like hiring specialist teachers, new technology on campus and hiring counselors, each of which can improve the quality of education, but have been hard to pay for in recent years.

"It goes down to services as well as instruction. "? Schools now, they are very much challenged in terms of services they can do," Evans said. "My school, and every other school I knew in the Cincinnati area, had choral groups and music groups and athletic teams and they had counselors that didn't have to service countless students."

"Right now, we just don't have the funding to do that," said Judson.

His district received $5,696 per student in the 2011-2012 school year. In the coming year, the district expects to receive $5,887 per student, a modest $191 increase for each of its roughly 12,500 students.

"I've seen studies from other groups that in the top funded states in the country how many counselors they have per students, how many nurses they have per students, how many libraries they have per students, and we just don't have that. "All those things make a huge difference."